This is another one of those articles I don’t get and never will. It talks about how gay men are better guides to straight people when it involves relationship issues. I think it came from a scene in Sex in the City...or something else as dismal.

In any event, it’s interesting to see how they portray gay men and how this time they insult straight people.

In theory, we’re probably the last people these folks should be turning to for advice. After all, most of us have absolutely zero experience with opposite-sex relationships. And surely we have just as many problems in our partnerships. But let’s face it: there are certain things we do differently and, well, better. (Of course, we’re sure opposite-sex couples could teach us a thing or two, too.)

Really?

Here’s an example of the kind of idiocy they are hawking. Remember this is advice from a gay POV to straight people. Please don’t blame me. I have nothing to do with it.

As gay men, we’re not above asking our boyfriend to bat his eyelashes at the male flight attendant if it means complimentary in-flight cocktails for the next six hours. Flirting can be an excellent way of getting things: discounts, free upgrades, special treatments, you name it.

Can your girlfriend’s cleavage get you an upgrade on your rental car? Great! Can your boyfriend’s sparkling blue eyes and dashing smile charm the hostess into seating you early? Awesome! Allowing your partner permission to work his or her magic on others can actually benefit you, too. And it will keep him or her happy short of having to sleep with the subject of the flirting. So stop acting all jealous and insecure and enjoy the perks of being in a relationship with someone other people find desirable. It won’t last forever, honey.

First, I pay for my drinks, thank you. Second, is this idiot really telling a guy to pimp out his girlfriend in this sexist way to get a better rental car? What about the girlfriend telling the boyfriend to drop his zipper a few inches? This only tells him to bat his eyelashes. I think there’s a difference. When Rose McGowan says gay men aren’t supporting women enough, I’m starting to think she may have a point.

Here’s just the title of one:

You don’t have to get married. Ever

Well, yes you do, especially if you want to own property, furniture, cars, etc… Getting legally married helps in a number of ways financially, and it even helps if you decide to get a divorce because the laws are written up in a way that make everything pretty much black and white. Without that marriage license there’s no proof of anything. I’m talking about younger people now, not older couples who are on their second or third time around. But even in that case living together has far less advantages than marriage…why we’ve been fighting for gay marriage all this time.

My advice is to ignore everything you read here. The fact is that gay marriages/relationships aren’t all that different from straight ones. There’s even gender politics involved but that’s too complicated to get into right now. And always remember that when you take advice from anyone about anything make sure you’re getting that advice based on someone with experience. I have to wonder how much experience the author of this article has.

I have to admit one thing, which is a little refreshing. At least this one insults both gay and straight people. The author’s name is listed at the bottom. I’d watch out for this one in the future.

Naughty Gay Pups-Arf!

I have to admit that I’ve always wanted to post something on this topic but I don’t know enough about it to comment, and I tend to shy away from things like because it’s considered so taboo in publishing. So I’m just linking this time.

Woof woof oink! Pups and gear pigs clustered at the Seattle Eagle last Friday for Arf!, a night of kink, fetish, bath house disco and sleazy dance tunes. Zak the Barber and Pup Kai hosted a frisky puppy pile, and DJs Tony Radovich and Nark kept the animals dancing all night.

These days, it seems like gay bars are an endangered species, with all the good old gritty hole-in-the-wall dives closing up shop. Nice to see the gays can still break out their harnesses and work up some musk when the occasion calls for it.

If you don’t get that, don’t be upset. You’re not alone because I don’t get it either.

The rest is here, with photos of men dressed as dogs and other various images that don’t help gay men look at that dignified. Ruff Ruff 🙂

Hollywood Gay Murders

This is interesting because it involves gay men and pop culture. It’s a piece about gay murders in Hollywood that have taken place over the years. There are a lot I know nothing about, but I do remember reading about Sal Mineo more than once. His murder is in here, along with this one I never heard before.

Danny Lockin

Best known for his portrayal of Barnaby Tucker in the 1969 film version of Hello, Dolly!, actor and dancer Danny Lockin’s final performance occurred on an August 21, 1977 taping of The Gong Show, where he and his dance partner tied for first place. To celebrate their victory, the pair decided to go for a drink at The Mug, a gay bar in Garden Grove. Danny was later seen leaving the establishment with a 34-year-old regular named Charles Leslie Hopkins. Hours later, Hopkins called police to say he’d been robbed. But upon showing up at his apartment, cops found the body of Lockin, who’d been stabbed nearly 100 times. Since only six of the stab wounds turned out to be fatal, it was believed Danny had not only bled out but that he’d been tortured and stabbed repeatedly after his death. Despite the discovery of what the press referred to as a “torture diary” (which featured Polaroids of the murder and led authorities to believe the crime was premeditated) at the residence, police had failed to secure a proper search warrant and the book was ruled inadmissible. Hopkins was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to four years in jail.

I think this title is a little misleading, but by no means completely off. The title of the article to which I’m linking is Flowers in the Attic Earns Lifetime Best Ratings Since 2012. However, it’s no secret that a huge part of the plot in this storyline deals with incest in the most obvious way.

I’m also not judging the content by any means. I’m just stating a fact. And I’m doing that because of the recent censorship at retail e-book web sites where more books than I can count were taken down as a result of a misguided article from the misleading web site, The Kernel. This brand of censorship also happened with PayPal not too long ago. And I’ve even posted about a TV show where Ryan Murphy’s American Horror got into rape, pedophilia, and bestiality one night in the most blatant way…much the same way Flowers in the Attic gets into incest.

If you missed “Flowers” you can catch an encore presentation after this weekend’s upcoming premiere of another Lifetime original movie, “Lizzie Borden Took An Ax,” which stars Christina Ricci.Not a mention of incest anywhere in the article.

Again, I’m not judging or even commenting on Flowers in the Attic. But authors, especially erotic and romance authors, have always gone by specific guidelines with most publishers. And in those guidelines it is always stated that there are certain places authors will not go. Among those places are bestiality, incest, rape, and pedophilia.

And recently thousands of authors, both self-pubbed and those with publishers, had books taken down at retail web sites where e-books are sold because the titles of covers *suggested* there might be taboo topics in the storylines thanks to search engines. I have had this happen to me twice, once with a book titled Skater Boy. There was nothing taboo in the book, and nothing coming even close to the topics in Flowers in the Attic and American Horror, but the search engine picked up the word boy, assumed my story was barely legal content, and my book was taken down as a result.

And when TV shows can get away with all kind of taboo topics and authors who write erotic romance can’t, I’m starting to think there’s something seriously wrong in one direction or the other.

Side note: I have never personally written anything considered “taboo.”

M/M Romance and Women

When I saw this next post on social media earlier today I wanted to post about it for the women who read gay romance…or male/male romance. There have been other articles like it, but the fact that Cleis Press shared this article on social media was interesting to me. As if they had just discovered that women like reading M/M romance. Cleis Press is one of the oldest and most respected LGBTI publishers in the US. I’ve been published by them many times in collections and anthologies and I’ve always loved working with their editors.

I was a little shocked the article didn’t know much about M/M romance, and the people who commented knew even less. But I guess I shouldn’t be shocked all that much. I’m sure a lot of people don’t know about it…at least not yet.

A friend posted a video of two men kissing the other day and the response from women was, shall we say, heated… as in, every single woman who responded thought it was hot. Granted, there was some selection bias, but it was enough to get me thinking. So I did some shallow digging and uncovered a comparatively large cache of media, mostly written, though there’s plenty of visual too, (cheeky little gifs), that cater to women who love watching homoerotic situations and / or gay sex. The fact that M/M erotica and porn do very well with the female demographic, (and not just in the gay community), tells me there’s something there. What I’d love to do is figure out what that something might be.Well, my dear blogger, I’ve been writing gay fiction for over twenty years and if you want to really figure out what that might be, just read my anthology where women authors who love M/M Romance wrote short stories that included women and gay characters within each storyline. I know I gained a great deal of insight while I was editing it. And I don’t think there is another book like it anywhere.

It’s called The Women Who Love to Love Gay Romance and you can purchase it here for .99. Or, even better, you can find it here at ARe for free. That should tell you all you need to know, or at least it’s a good start because these stories come from the heart of the women who read M/M romance. And although there is sex, that’s NOT what it’s all about.

And if that’s not enough, check out Ravenous Romance, Riverdaleavenuebooks, Dreamspinner Press, Wilde City Press, and Silver Publishing…to just name a few off the top of my head who know all about M/M Romance and how women love reading it.

Rolling Stone on American Horror Story’s Incest, Bestiality, and Camp…

When I posted about American Horror Story’s most recent episode last week, I failed to mention the camp factor this season. But someone pointed me toward this article in Rolling Stone, and RS didn’t miss a beat. In fact, the entire commentary is priceless.

On Jessica Lange and the camp factor:

I usually tell them something along the lines of, “Long stretches of fabulous camp punctuated by lurid horror.” Most of that luscious camp is provided by Jessica Lange, which is why I cannot conceive of her leaving the show. Lange has helped make the show a cult classic before its time and it often rivals films like “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.” And I can’t help wondering if twenty years from now gay men of the future will be imitating Lange, verbatim.

On Incest:

While AHS’s horror tends to be violence-related, Coven conjured those moments in the most unexpected and unsettling ways. Like the incestuous Frankenstein abuse!

I just kept sitting there saying, “No, they aren’t going there. Tell me that didn’t just happen.”

And this part about bestiality just made me grab the arms of my chair:

Also, apparently she’s so desperate for love that she, well, she tries to lose her virginity to the Minotaur when he shows up to kill LaLaurie.Yes, Queenie went out to the backyard to cruise a beast.

RS is being kind. There are some films where you remember exact scenes and for some reason they remain in your head forever. This scene, for me, will always be one of them. When Gabourey Sidibe, who plays Queenie, lifted her dress and shoved her fingers between her legs I knew I would never be the same again.

I still think that scene was out of character. I wanted to see Queenie show off her powers and tame the beast. I didn’t want to see her touch herself and bend over backwards.

The RS article goes into more detail about making babies witchcraft style, and discusses a scene where Lange kills off a character who is supposed to be the next “supreme.” And in the style of classic camp, heartless Lange tells the tongueless guy to remove the body from the living room because… “This coven doesn’t need a new Supreme. It needs a new rug.”

There’s not much taboo stuff left, so I wonder what’s next. They even covered rape in the first show. And forget about barely legal. The young women in the show are playing all underage characters.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been posting about my own experiences with censorship at retail web sites where e-books are sold like Amazon, Kobo, and Smashwords. These web sites started censoring self-published e-books thanks to an article in a questionable UK publication called The Kernel. The self-published e-books targeted allegedly contained topics like rape, incest, bestiality, pedophilia, and other topics most romance publishers will not publish. As a result, several web sites removed all self-pubbed titles to suss out the e-books with “taboo” topics. One web site even shut down. Amazon started clearing out their “taboo” topics through search engines, and e-books without the said “taboo” topics were removed for no reason, and without a viable explanation. And guess what I saw last night on American Horror Story: bestiality, incest, and pedophilia.

This article I’m linking to now discusses American Horror Story in an almost light-hearted way. If an author of erotic romance were to do this he/she would be slammed from one end of the Internet to the other.

Death, incest, bestiality, the gang’s all here!We’re sure this is going to be a weekly occurence, but American Horror Story: Coven had its most insane outing yet on Oct. 23 with “The Replacements,” which found Supreme witch Fiona (Jessica Lange) making her first big kill of the season in an attempt to protect her witchy throne. Plus, the recently-resurrected Kyle (Evan Peters) finally spoke and one of the girls got a little too close to the Minotaur monster for our comfort. Seriously, does anyone have brain soap?!I did see the show last night and I just sat there watching it wondering how the fuck they can get away with all this on TV and authors like me who don’t even go near “taboo” topics like that have been dealing with the worst brand of censorship since PayPal in 2012. I’m not judging American Horror Story and I’m not judging authors, publishers, or e-books that contain these “taboo” topics. However, I am questioning the actions of the large retail web sites where e-books are sold who made these recent mass sweeps of all books without taking into consideration that many of the books in question never violated one single guideline. I had a book removed from Amazon titled, “Internal Desires,” and the reason why it was removed was because of words like “young” in the book description. And the characters in that book were all well over the legal age limit and it contained nothing that’s considered “taboo.” This week I had a book titled, “Young Doughy Joey,” taken down at another web site for the same reason. It contained nothing “taboo.”

So in their quest to censor the “taboo” topics all authors are now targets of retail web sites where e-books are sold, innocent words like young have become “taboo,” and we’ve basically entered a police state where freedom of speech means nothing anymore.

And the most ironic thing of all is bestiality, incest, pedophilia, and other “taboo” topics are now being treated lightly on television and no one seems to find any fault in that at all. As I said, I’m not judging American Horror Story. They have every right to do what they want. But when I saw one scene where one character lifted her dress, crudely shoved her fingers between her legs, and invited some kind of half man half beast to have sex with her I cringed for several reasons. One, I cringed for the actress. She’s not very good, and that scene seemed to diminish her even more. Two, I cringed because the producer of the show took advantage of a young woman’s need for love and turned it into something disgusting with an animal. Three, because it took the character completely out of context. And four, because television shows like American Horror Story make millions of dollars and small self-published authors who don’t write about bestiality, incest, and pedophilia, and who struggle to make ends meet just to pay for copy editors, can’t even use words like young anymore without fearing their books will be censored by Amazon, Kobo, or Smashwords.

It will be interesting to see how this all turns out with e-books. And even more interesting to see what “taboo” topic Ryan Murphy will sensationalize and diminish next.

The title of the article to which I’m linking now is “Self-published Erotica Writers Strike Back,” but once again, that’s not completely true and the article is misleading on several levels. When large retail web sites where e-books are sold started targeting/censoring books for questionable content, they did begin with self-published books. But I know for a fact that e-publishers are now dealing with the fallout, too.

I hesitate to post anything more about that until I have more facts. However, I did receive an interesting e-mail from one of my publishers last week. And as usual, the books in question with the publishers are not books that would violate the concept of what’s considered questionable content…I hate to even go there, but questionable content includes things like underage characters, barely legal, incest, etc… The books I’m talking about have been targeted based on one word. In my case it’s the word virgin, and yet all the characters are legal age. These retail web sites are doing broad sweeps with search engines, and books with normally innocent words like virgin, boy, girl, or anything else that suggests something taboo are being censored and taken down.

This issue has now made the mainstream media, and even though the article isn’t completely accurate, I thought it was interesting that the issue has gone this far.

Daudelin called for Amazon to establish clear guidelines. She also posted Kobo’s new rules, which includes the following guideline: “Users may not publish written, image, audio or video content that promotes pedophilia, incest, bestiality, or sexual violence or force.”You can read more here.

Frankly, I have no comment on the books with questionable content, for lack of a better phrase. That’s not my fight and I’m not personally willing to go up on a hill and die for books that do contain pedophilia or incest, or whatever. I don’t read them, write them, or want anything to do with them. They disgust me. My issue is this: don’t penalize other erotica authors who aren’t writing books with incest or pedophilia like I’ve been penalized just for one word or a title that gets caught and flagged in a search engine by some clueless idiot who doesn’t know any better.

NYT Sex Issue Sans Romance Authors

The New York Times Book Review did a piece called “Let’s Read About Sex,” and allegedly overlooked romance authors. As a result, author Sarah Maclean, who writes historical romance, replied with a letter to the editor:

Romance holds a huge share of the consumer market, with more than $1.4 billion in sales in 2012, so the omission is surprising. The lack of romance authors is especially glaring when one considers that each week, the mass-market, e-book and combined best-seller lists compiled by The New York Times include dozens of books from this far-reaching genre: historical, contemporary, paranormal, erotic and new adult.

I’m not completely surprised they didn’t include romance authors…or gay romance authors. The most elite in the literary world typically don’t include romance authors in anything that even remotely resembles an academic piece. And this is in spite of the fact that if it weren’t for romance authors and romance novels the so-called literistic works the elitists do discuss wouldn’t have a fat chance in hell getting published because in many cases it’s romance that’s keeping many of them afloat these days. Think Fifty Shades of Grey and all the money it made for the publisher.

I’d like to see them try to survive waiting for Jonathan Franzen to write his next bestselling novel, because if all of publishing depended on the speed of the literistic like bird-watching Franzen who puts out a novel every decade or so we’d all be in trouble.

Author of over 100 published LGBT romance novels and stories, including AN OFFICER AND HIS GENTLEMAN and best selling VIRGIN BILLIONAIRE SERIES. Hates beets.
New Hope, PA Palm Springs, CA
ryan-field.blogspot.com